Three years ago, I was approaching burnout. I was seeing 18-20 patients per day in my optometry clinic and I thought my fingers were going to fall off from constant charting.
Patient care was suffering because I spent more time in front of the computer screen than I did talking to patients. When I chose to spend time talking to patients face-to-face, I created a discouraging and seemingly insurmountable backlog of charting to finish at the end of the day. In the past, my partner had considered using a clinical scribe, but we had never acted on it.
Finally, enough was enough.
I decided I was willing to hire a clinical scribe, even though I would have to increase overhead costs with additional staffing.
Three years later, I have increased the number of patients I see to 28-30 per day (roughly four patients per hour) and am home for dinner by 5:30 p.m.
The transition to a clinical scribe is painful but the results are priceless. Now I can see more patients in a shorter amount of time, yet patients feel they are getting better care because I don’t use my computer. Instead, I face them for the complete exam, while the scribe in the background is carefully and quietly recording the results of the exam.
Steps to successfully adding a scribe.
- Determine your per patient visit by dividing your total monthly collections by the number of 92015s billed out that month. Average is around $300 for easy numbers.
- Use current staff compensation for an equivalent to your assistant. This would most likely be the individual that does the pre-testing for your patients. Let’s assume you pay them total compensation of $25,000 per year. You should plan on adding this amount to your staff overhead. Yes, this is the part that keeps you from executing the plan to add a scribe.
- Divide the $25,000 above by 300 (per patient visit) and you get approximately 84. That is the number of patients you would need to add to your schedule in one year to make the investment a money neutral investment. This does not calculate all psychological and patient care benefits, only the monetary investment.
- If you practice 4 days a week for 40 weeks of the year, then you would have 160 days in the clinic and 84 of those days you would have to see one more patient.
Adding a clinical scribe is a relatively safe investment that can pay dividends monetarily. More importantly, I have found it improved my ability to care for my patients as well as my quality of life.
